Roman roads

Since when did the English love to queue?

This is a treasure house of a book, filled with curiosities and evidence of a rare breadth of patient investigation. Anyone who has read one of Graham Robb’s books, from his early biographies of classic French writers, through a wonderfully amusing study of 19th-century homosexuals, to a series of historical and geographical studies of France and Britain, will not be surprised at that. What is new in this idiosyncratic history of the British Isles is Robb shifting some of his own encounters to the foreground. In previous books, the experience of bicycling has been fruitfully used. Robb and his wife Margaret are serious cyclists, and the pace and scale of

Why all Roman roads really did lead to Rome

Whatever the problems involved in building, let alone finishing, HS2, it is hoped that it will replicate what was ultimately achieved – prosperity, intentionally or not – by the 53,000 miles of roads with which Rome covered its empire (and so successfully that prosperity is now found wherever networks of Roman roads were established across Europe, including Cornwall). The first Roman road was the Via Appia (named after its proposer Appius Claudius), built in 312 bc. It connected Rome with the port of Brindisi 300 miles south; it also offered easy crossing to the wealthy Greek East. This became of great importance: travel by ship, far faster than by road,